Cultural organizations lack a common voice

Ragnar Siil, Creative And Cultural Sectors Specialist, EU-EaP Culture And Creativity Programme, on who supports creative people in Europe.

I think one the big problems in post-soviet countries is that cultural sectors tend to be very scattered, they are very fragmented, they lack this strong, common voice and they lack those umbrella organizations. Now, what it also means is that it’s very difficult for the governments to work with the sector, because the information that it gets from the sector is very fragmented, and it is also very difficult for the culture sector to fight for its rights, to say with one voice that ‘we, you know, hundreds or thousands of creative people from one or another sector, think like this, so we need to be taken seriously’. And another problem is that many of these associations tend to steal old times.

We are in real need in Eastern partnership countries of associations, and organizations, or centres, call them however you like, which would look at the business development side of the sector as well as the internationalization, looking at how can we export better to foreign markets.

These centres are extremely successful because they very specifically work with companies, with individual artists to help to promote them, to help them to be better not only as an artist but also as a business. So I think this is the way that Europe is going now and I think this is something that associations here in the Eastern partnership countries should look at more carefully.

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